The window stood open as I had left it.  Outside, in the windless frosty night, the snow on the house-roofs sparkled under a wintering moon now near the close of her first quarter.  But though the night was windless, a current of air poured into the room, and had set a little flame dancing in the fireplace where, three minutes ago, the sea-coals had held but a feeble glow, half-sullen.  Downstairs, in some distant apartment, fiddles were busy with a waltz tune, and a violoncello kept the beat with a low thudding pizzicato.  For Mr Felix was giving a Christmas party.

I turned from this hasty glance to pick up another snuff-box.  As my fingers closed on it the music suddenly grew louder, and I looked up as the door opened, and a man stood on the threshold—­a short, square-set man, dressed in black.

‘Eh?’ He gave a little start of surprise.  ’No, no, excuse me, my friend, but you are seeking in the wrong cabinet.’

Before I could pull myself together, he had stepped to the window and closed it.  ‘You had best keep quite still,’ he said, ’and then we can talk.  There are servants on the stairs below, and should you attempt the way you came there are three constables just around the corner.  I hired them to regulate the carriage traffic:  but now that the last guest has arrived, they will be cooling their heels for a spell; and I have a whistle.  I have also a pistol.’  With a turn of his hand he flung open a door in a dark armoire beside the window, dived a hand into its recesses, and produced the weapon.  ’And it is loaded,’ he added, still in the same business-like voice, in which, after his first brief exclamation, my ear detected no tremor.

‘By all means let us talk,’ I said.

He was crossing to the fireplace, but wheeled about sharply at the sound of my voice.  ‘Eh?  An educated man, apparently!’ Laying the pistol on the mantelshelf, he plucked a twisted spill of paper from a vase hard by, stooped, ignited it from the flame dancing in the sea-coals, and proceeded to light the candles in an old-fashioned girandole that overhung the fireplace.  There were five candles, and he lit them all.

They revealed him a clean-shaven, white-haired man, meticulously dressed in black—­black swallowtail coat, open waistcoat, and frilled shirt-front, on which his laundress must have spent hours of labour; closely fitting black knee-breeches, black silk stockings, black polished shoes.  They silhouetted, too, in the moment before he swung round on me, an enormous nose, like a punchinello’s, and the outline of a shapely head, sufficiently massive to counterbalance and save it from caricature.  The size of the head again would have suggested deformity, but for the broad shoulders that carried it.  As he faced me squarely with his back to the hearth, his chest and shoulders narrowing to the hips of a runner, and still narrowing (though he stood astraddle) to ankles and feet that would not have disgraced a lady, he put me in mind of a matador I had seen years before, facing his bull in the ring at Seville.  The firelight behind them emphasised the neat outline of his legs.  He carried a black cloak on his left arm, and in his left hand an opera-hat, pressed flat against his left side.  In closing the window, in finding and producing the pistol, and again in lighting the candles, he had used his right hand only.